


And One And Two And

by shinyhappyfitsofrage



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Coping, F/M, Gen, Heartache, Post Series, Post-Endgame, Pregnancy, just a sad, ow my heart, sad i am sorry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-24
Updated: 2016-07-24
Packaged: 2018-07-26 12:35:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7574263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinyhappyfitsofrage/pseuds/shinyhappyfitsofrage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The second time the world ended in as many months, Artemis calls Dick. It feels somewhat wrong, especially in these circumstances. The person she should really be calling is Wally. But that's largely impossible due to the fact that he is largely dead.</p><p>[a post-endgame heart ache]</p>
            </blockquote>





	And One And Two And

**Author's Note:**

> "I'm sorry for your loss. Anyway, that's what you're supposed to say." 
> 
> [a rewrite of something I wrote when I couldn't write]

When she finds out, the first person she calls is Dick.

It’s a strange choice, and another Artemis would’ve been skeptical. Another Artemis would have called M’gann or Zatanna, or perhaps her mother. Maybe even her sister, although that’s a long shot. Jade never even told her she had a _child_ until it was convenient for her to do so.

The person she should really be calling is Wally. But that’s largely impossible due to the fact that he is largely dead.

When Dick arrives, she’s already at the kitchen table, her finger nails tugging at the skin on her arm, her elbow scraping against some dried food she’d never cleaned up. He doesn’t bother knocking. He stopped knocking when these meetings started to occur more often, whenever either one of them remembered Wally too hard. Sometimes at the Palo Alto apartment, sometimes at Wayne Manor. Regardless of the location they always ended up surrounded by empty beer bottles and empty cardboard boxes ( _you have to get rid of his stuff_ , her mother’s voice echoes against the linoleum).

But this time there is no box of beer waiting on the counter, no cardboard boxes labeled _DVDs_ or _Winter Wear_. This time, she sits at the table and waits, grinding her teeth, trying to control her breathing. She counts to four as she breathes in, and to four as she breathes out, and it works for a few moments, but then she starts _thinking_ and before she knows it she at _breathe in one, two, three, four, out two three, one two, one, one, one_ –

Dick says nothing as he sits down across from her, and she instantly is reminded of why she called Dick and not M’gann or Zatanna or perhaps her mother. They all would have smiled, thin-lipped, and placed hands on her shoulder and rubbed her back sympathetically, and asked how she was doing or what they can do to help, as if a cup of hot lemon ginger tea will keep her lungs from freezing and snapping in half every time she breathes. Everyone lost Wally, but Artemis _lost_ him, and Dick is the only person in the whole world whose grief is as uniquely torturous as hers.

Of course she called Dick.

“So,” he says after a while, his voice just barely above a murmur. “What’s the plan for today? Are we going to pretend to sort through his sweaters, or just cut the pretenses and get shit-faced?”

 _Breathe normally_ , she reminds herself angrily. _One, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four. In, two, three, out, two, three, in, two, out, two, intwo, outtwo, in –_  “I think I’m having a panic attack,” she spits out.

Dick straightens his spine, thrown off. Usually they panic at the same time, usually drunk, so that neither can really comfort the other. “Oh. Okay. Um, what do you –“

“I don’t know,” she snaps. “Just – just say something, please. Anything.”

“Okay, okay. Um… don’t panic. Everything will be – I don’t know, okay, fine, let’s go with fine. The usual stuff. Life goes on. Not for Wal – shit, sorry… I’m running out of clichés here, Artemis. Um… the sun will come tomorrow?”

It’s half-assed, although she doesn’t know what she was actually expecting coming from Dick. Nevertheless, it’s a stupid enough response to distract her from herself, and she exhales at a normal pace. “I hear it’s… it’s actually supposed to downpour tomorrow.”

“Figures,” says Dick. She looks up at him. His sunglasses are on the table, his blue eyes only wearing heavy bags. She wants to iron them out with her finger, but instead she rests her chin in her hands.

Eventually, he speaks up again. “Are you – is there a particular reason we’re panicking today? Apart from the, you know, the usual suspect.”

“He’s sort of the reason,” says Artemis lamely. “Not really, though.”

“Great,” says Dick. “That’s a lot clear-“

“I’m pregnant.”

“-er,” he ekes out. She sneaks a look at him before returning to the crack on the table currently in between her ring and middle finger on her right hand. For the first time in weeks, he doesn’t look exhausted, just wholly and totally bewildered, his mouth hanging open ever so slightly, the only part of his face moving his eyebrows as he tries to comprehend what she just said.

“No need to rush to congratulate me,” she mutters, not that she was expecting congratulations.

He recovers. “How _–“_

“What, Batman didn’t give you the talk?” she asks wryly.

“-far long are you,” he finishes.

“Oh.” Dick is down to business, still comprehending the all but literal bomb she’d placed on the table like it was a cereal box or another case of Budweiser. She’d been sitting with it for only a few hours, ever since she’d bought the pregnancy test after staring her own vomit in the face for the third straight day, and already it’s not news, it’s a fact, a jagged, terrifying fact. She runs her hands along her hair, her finger nails getting caught in the little tangles she was too tired to brush out of her ponytail. “Um. Considering that there have been very limited windows of opportunity for – you know, in the past four months… I can assure you with _some_ certainty that it has been almost exactly two months.”

Dick nods. “Okay.” After a moment, a look of almost embarrassed realization appears on his face. He coughs. “ _Oh_ , okay. That’s the – shit, that puts it at…  the night you came home.”

She smiles wanely. The two month anniversary of a sharp breeze where he used to be and then nothing, of a bright flash then nothing, is tomorrow. She runs a finger nail through an old groove on the table. “Yeah.” She shakes her head. “You know he had –“

“A cake,” finishes Dick, exhaling heavily. “Yeah, I know. He told me. And a banner. And confetti.”

“What a fucking idiot,” says Artemis, and she bites her tongue, and scrunches her eyes shut suddenly as she remembers the hesitant, trembling grin on his face when he flicked the light switch to reveal the grocery store cake that read _Welcome home, from Wally + Brucely,_ and she remembers the way she put a head to her forehead and sighed not unkindly at the mess of dirty dishes in the kitchen, and the _oh, God, you have to breathe, Artemis, one and two and one and one and_ –

She shakes her head again, harder, trying to dislodge him in vain. “I don’t – I don’t know what to do, Dick.”

He stares at her, his shoulders slumped but calm, his expression determined, like it’s another mystery he has to solve, just another wild mad man on the loose, instead of the second end of the world in as many months. When he speaks, he chooses his words carefully. “Have you considered – “ He hesitates. “You don’t have to –“

“Goddamnit, Dick, you know I do,” she snaps, running her tongue around the inside of her cheek, glaring at the dying fern in the corner of the kitchen. Wally is dead (and a month ago she spent two weeks holed up in her room alone researching desperately a phenomenon no one else had ever heard of to find a way back from a death no one had ever died from), and all that’s left is sweaters and sticky-notes he left on the fridge and essays he bullshitted at two am with his head resting on her hip bone, and if the universe is going to give her even the _tiniest_ piece of him back, then by God she is going to take it.

Dick just nods simply. “Okay, you do,” he says, not trying to make her see reason. “Okay. Okay. We can do this.”

Artemis turns away from the plant, back to Dick. His face is matter-of-fact, his lips flat, and she can see a thousand plans forming behind his eyes. She frowns. “I – _we_.”

“I’m going to help,” he says, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “With – I don’t know. With whatever. Anything. Everything.”

A lump of pride, a tumor left over from Gotham she hasn't been able to remove after all these years, makes her bristle. “I don’t need your _money_ , Dick,” she says.

He looks at her, askance, then straightens his spine against the kitchen chair. “That’s not what I mean, and you know it,” he says icily.

She exhales. _And breathe in, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four._ “Right, sorry. I’m an ass.” He doesn’t bother to correct her.

After a moment of terse silence, Dick says lowly, “I meant… I meant, like, doctor’s appointments, and food, and if you feel gross or anything, I can run errands for you, and help you plan a baby shower - if you’re having one,” he throws in hastily at the alarmed look on her face. “Look, you’re my best friend, Artemis, you know that, and so was Wally… and I know you _could_ do this alone, but I don’t think he’d want you to. And I don’t just mean the pregnancy _part_ of it, you know? Like with the actual, well, baby –“

Artemis nearly chokes again – she’d been so focused on surviving the next seven months, surviving tomorrow, that she’d all but forgotten that pregnancy leads to… well, _infants_. A baby. _Her_ baby. All she knows about being a parents is her mother’s quiet support from across the silent dining table, her father’s words stinging her skin. _Again, baby girl, not good enough. Again, again, again –_

 _Breathe in, two, three, four, out, two, three, in two, outtwo, in, out_ –

“Artemis!” Hands are on either side of her face, and for a wild moment she lets her imagination pretend it’s Wally, but it’s not, it’s Dick and it always will be, because at least she’ll always have Dick, except that’s what she had thought about Wally, and that’s what she’d thought about her mother, and her sister, and her father, and that’s what she thought about Mount Justice and home…

“It’ll be okay,” he says, and he is no longer Dick Grayson but Nightwing, and she can just see where the cowl fits perfectly on his face. “I know you’re freaking out, and I know that… but, well, look at it this way. It can’t get any worse, right?”

She stares at him for a moment, at the stupid, desperate half-smile on his face, at the space he has taken up in her kitchen, and she lets out a shaky laugh. “Fuck you, Dick,” she says. She shoves him away by the nose, and rubs her eye with her fist, half-formed tears landing on her skin. The laugh warmed her lungs to a less brittle state, and when she blows out air through her nose in another sound verging on laughter, it doesn't sting and it doesn't scrap against her insides. This is why she called Dick. "Fuck you," she says again, and she is almost - something sort of content, something sort of resigned. 

Dick smiles. “Yeah, you wish,” he says, and it’s stupid enough that she laughs again.

They don’t get drunk that day (and she realises that she’s lost that escape for a while), but they sit on her couch and watch _Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind_ , because it’s on Starz and because they didn’t know how Wally felt about that movie so it couldn’t hurt. And they fall asleep on the couch together, and in sleep, her breathing finally slows to a pace that won’t burn out.  

 

**Author's Note:**

> I have about four or five spin-offs inspired by this whole concept. In case I never actually write them, his name is Jason Wallace West (Artemis decides that, despite all the times she'd teased Wally as she sat in on a particularly chaotic Thanksgiving, that there are not enough Wests in the world). He was Jason long before I made the connection to Jason Spisak.


End file.
